SOUNDTRACK: TROUBLE FUNK-Tiny Desk Concert #748 (May 30, 2018).
If Tiny Desk was set anywhere other than Washington D.C. I would never have heard of go-go. It is a regional funk style that seems to have never left the area and of which the DC crowd is very proud.
Go-go — Washington D.C.’s regional twist on funk — reigned in the DMV during the 1980s, and one of the scene’s signature acts was Trouble Funk. More than 30 years later, the collective — led by Big Tony Fisher — still fills sold-out venues with heavyweight percussion and call-and-response lyrics. Trouble Funk concerts are bona fide jam sessions, so I was determined to squeeze their unrelenting rhythms behind the Tiny Desk. While the late Chuck Brown is often acknowledged as the godfather of go-go, Trouble Funk was a key part of the sound’s second wave.
And considering that the band is decked out in matching Trouble Funk baseball uniforms, it seems like they have no intention of going anywhere (clearly not all of the members are original).
How do you fit 12 members behind a Tiny Desk? Put the horns: (Dean Harris (trumpet), Eric Silvan (saxophone), Paul Phifer (trombone)) on the right. Put the drummer (Tony Edwards) on the left and the hugely important percussionists (Chris Allen and Larry Blake) back and center, anchoring everything.
Then you have the keyboardists (Allyson Johnson and James Avery) and the guitarist/vocalist David Gussom (only one guitar in the whole band of 12 people!).
Right up front you have the two singers Derrick Ward and Keith White and orchestrating the whole thing is Big Tony Fisher (bass/vocals).
They begin with the 1982 banger, “Pump Me Up”, which has a great watery funky bass sound (from the keys) and tremendous percussion. All of the verses are rapped in a 35-year-old-style–rhythmic more than rapping (with lyrics about Calvin Klein and other jeans, Superman, Studio 54 and Fat Albert). Four of them take a verse, but the show is all about Big Tony Fisher, who has got this great deep voice.
Incidentally, this song was
sampled in Public Enemy’s protest anthem “Fight the Power” and M/A/R/R/S’s dance classic “Pump Up The Volume.”
I need to hear the original to figure out what was sampled.
The drums breaks here are definitive go-go and it was hard to discern who was having more fun: the band or the audience.
As they shift to “Grip It,” you can hear the change of style but not intensity as the song shifts and “buoyant and staccato horn melodies propelled the song forward.”
It segues to “Let’s Get Small” through a funky bass line. It features Trouble Funk’s classic call-and-response chants of “I like it!”
The music stops but the rhythm continues as they segue into “Drop the Bomb,” “another notable gem from their lengthy discography which keeps the energy level high.”
“Don’t Touch That Stereo” was the first song where I couldn’t hear much of a difference between it and the preceding song. And I realized that they’d been playing nonstop for nearly 14 minutes–all in a similar funky style. It’s a great fun party even if the individual songs are kind of beside the point.
They did take a short break as Tony introduced their first hit from 1979 “E Flat Boogie.”
I’m rather surprised that go-go never took off anywhere else, since, as the blurb says, the music “inspires a spirit of dance, rhythm and sheer joy.”
[READ: July 7, 2016] “Fable”
This was another story that I found strangely unsatisfying.
I feel like this story was almost perfect but that there were elements that prevented it from being so.
Since it is called “Fable,” it begins with “once upon a time.” But we know that it is not a real fable exactly because the next part is “there was a man whose therapist thought it would be a good idea for the man to work though some stuff by telling a story about that stuff.”
His first attempt is short and dull: “one day the man woke up and realized that this was pretty much it for him.” Continue Reading »
I didn’t know All Them Witches before this show. And I don’t know them after this show. Parking in Asbury Park was pretty rough and, it being after Memorial Day traffic was worse than when I had driven down there in the winter.
I Just Read About That... 